With the number of households having multiple television sets increasing, and many users wanting the latest and greatest video viewing services, many households have multiple satellite receivers, cable set-top boxes, modems, et cetera. For in-home Internet access, each computer or Internet device has its own Internet connection. As such, each computer or Internet device includes a modem.
As an alternative, an in-home wireless local area network (LAN) may be used to provide Internet access and to communicate multimedia information to multiple devices within the home. In such an in-home local area network, each computer or Internet device includes a network card to access a server. The server provides the coupling to the Internet. The in-home wireless local area network can also be used to facilitate an in-home computer network that couples a plurality of computers with one or more printers, facsimile machines, as well as to multimedia content from a digital video recorder, set-top box, broadband video system, etc.
The wireless LAN can be secured via encryption methods that require an encryption key. When the wireless local area network is installed the encryption key must be chosen and manually entered by the user in each device. In addition, when a new client device is added to the network, the encryption key must be remembered so that it can be manually entered by the user. This process is time consuming and can lead to installation problems where the encryption key is lost.